Breadcrumbs

Pending Legislation

An Act Clarifying the Scope of the Local Mandate Law

This bill would clarify the scope of municipal protection pursuant to Section 27C of Chapter 29 of the General Laws, the so-called Local Mandate Law. The statute provides that any law taking effect on or after January 1, 1981 that imposes any additional costs upon a city or town will be effective only if fully funded by the Commonwealth or if locally accepted. In addition, it provides that that any post-1980 administrative regulation or law granting or increasing exemptions from local taxation will not be effective unless fully funded by the Commonwealth.

Over time, however, several court decisions have led to confusion about when the Local Mandate Law applies. Accordingly, and consistent with the original intent of the law, this bill would define the term "local mandate" to include state laws and regulations that increase the cost of programs and services that localities undertake voluntarily, such as providing foreign language courses for high school students and curbside trash pick up. Court interpretations indicate that the current text might limit application of the Local Mandate Law to laws and regulations that increase the cost of local activities that are explicitly required by state law, such as, for example, conducting state elections. The bill would also clarify that the Local Mandate Law applies to a costly amendment to a local option law, when the amendment is enacted after the municipality has voted to accept the original law.

Tool Name: Baynote, Inc. Recommendations

The information below summarizes privacy policy terms related to content recommendations on Mass.Gov and is excerpted from the full Mass.gov privacy policy.

Purpose: Displays relevant content recommendation based on the site usage pattern of all users of Mass.Gov. If Personalization is enabled (the default setting), your personal site usage pattern today and on prior visits to Mass.gov will be displayed to you and will also be a factor in determining personalized relevant recommendations for you.

Data Collected: A random anonymous unique identifier is assigned and tracked for each user of the website. This identifier is sent to our vendor, Baynote, when you view a page, open a document or click a link on Mass.Gov. Our vendor then analyzes the specific content that was viewed and provides content recommendations to similar content that you may find useful. A full description of what data Baynote collects and how it uses this data is available at http://www.baynote.com/baynote-services-privacy-policy/. Please note that the tool uses persistent cookies. These cookies will be Mass.gov domain cookies and not Baynote domain cookies. The cookies will store information related to a user’s Mass.gov Web site usage, including the URL and title of sites recently visited and the random anonymous unique identifier assigned to the user. In general, and as described in more detail in Baynote’s service privacy policy linked to above, Baynote only uses the personalized information it gathers to provide recommendation services and display past usage for Mass.Gov users and will not share this information with any third parties, including advertisers. The information collected will not affect content you may see on sites unaffiliated with Mass.Gov.

Express Opt Out: If personalization of recommendations based on the content you view is not desired, or you do not wish to display a list of recently viewed Mass.gov pages, you may turn personalization off. You can do this by using either the switch located below in this privacy policy or an identical switch located directly above the content recommendations and recently viewed content boxes displayed on the Mass.gov site. Once you turn off personalization, your content recommendations will be based on the overall traffic patterns of all users of Mass.Gov and they will not specifically take into account your own personal usage patterns. If you turn off personalization, information collected by this Tool that is associated with your content usage will be deleted from your cookies, and no further information about your content usage will be sent to our vendor.

Disabling personalization will affect both content recommendations and recently viewed page links. If you turn off personalization, this “off” setting will persist as you browse Mass.Gov and during any future sessions. The opt-out setting is stored in a persistent cookie on your computer. The setting will remain in effect so long as you use the same computer with the same Internet browser. If you delete the cookie that contains the opt-out setting or use a different browser or computer, personalization will be enabled and you will need to disable it again on your next visit, if desired.

For our full privacy policy, please close this window and see the Site Policies or Privacy Policy link in the footer of the page.